monster in red
by Sopran
Summary: Her memory is not so much pockmarked as it is surgically stitched into some monster of a thing, pretty on the surface and unstable underneath. It's a fitting metaphor for the Black Widow.


Natasha Romanov doesn't know how old she is.

She knows she's much older than she appears. She knows that the face she sees in the mirror has not aged for as long as she can remember - though, to be fair, her memory is not the most reliable thing (such things rarely are). She knows that she's only been working for SHIELD for less than a decade but she's been on their watch list twice as long.

She knows that her lab work says she is a profoundly healthy twenty-eight year old.

(She is more than just healthy. She is superior, a super human. A super solider. Exactly as she was made to be.)

(Her medical records are so heavily classified that only four people have seen them - Director Fury, Phil, Doctor Lee, and herself. There is no digital copy. The original was burned.)

Her earliest memory is of a room. She is small, a child, no older than eleven. She is practicing ballet. She is in _plie_ and she extends her left leg in second position, then curls it quickly toward her body, rising on _pointe_ and spinning in place. She performs nine consecutive _fouetté en tournant_ before the man - Uncle Ivan - comes in and stops her. "Enough," he says, "it is time for your treatment."

Natasha cannot remember the treatment - what it was, what it was for - but she can guess. She need only look at her young-old hands to see its effects.

There is much she can't remember, things she knows of only from reading her own file, the unedited one from when she was still a threat to SHIELD. (The stolen evidence in hard copy is kept in a hermetically sealed container buried ten feet below ground. Natasha alone knows the coordinates.) She's read about her exploits while she was KGB - she remembers much of the later missions, but nearly nothing before the mid 1970s. She remembers being married, though she can't remember his name or voice. She remembers the Winter Soldier named James but has forgotten his face.

Her memory is not so much pockmarked as it is surgically stitched into some monster of a thing, pretty on the surface and unstable underneath.

It's a fitting metaphor for the Black Widow.

Natasha owns her name, the seductively threatening handle and the mundane, masculine thing given to her by someone she can't recall. It's her name now, the only real constant in her life. "Black Widow" is "Natasha Romanov," and "Natasha Romanov" is "Black Widow." Her name is her only possession, and though it may not be her original name, whatever that had been, she will hold onto it with her dying breath.

She isn't bothered by much, not really (some of her KGB training had been removed, the things that kept her enslaved to a country she barely knows, but the rest is still there, and she can't function like normal people). Blood and subterfuge and torture and death are things she excels in, things she holds little remorse for. She is what she has been made and she was made to be a soldier. She keeps track of the things she's done (both remembered and recorded), knows how much is weighed against her soul, knows she can never pay that debt.

Her ledger is not just full of red - it bleeds.

Still, it does concern her that her body hasn't changed in all the years she remembers. She watches the people around her shift, skin growing looser and wrinkling with age, muscles smaller and weaker, minds less sharp. Some age more gracefully - Phil is mostly unchanged, still as competent and deadly as ever - while others do not - Clint is no less effective than when he saved her life in Prague but he's in his mid-thirties now and graying.

Natasha's body is only different in the number of scars she has.

(Not many. She doesn't scar easily and the oldest ones fade with time. The one Clint gave her the first time they met has completely disappeared now, leaving smooth and unblemished skin. It unsettles them both.)

When Captain America was brought up from the ocean in a tomb of ice and pronounced alive, Natasha spent more time than she would care to admit in his room. Mostly, she sat alone; sometimes, Phil joined her, for his own reasons. He was overjoyed that his idol was alive, that they would meet once Captain Rogers thawed.

Natasha looked at the frozen man and saw her own future.

(Of the four of them that had seen her medical records, only she and Fury understands what the anomaly in her blood came from. She knows he itches to try and replicate the modified serum that ran through her veins but she also knows that he'd never risk it. Nick Fury is many things, but needlessly reckless is not one of them - they're both painfully aware she's lucky to not have red or green skin.)

Her new team thinks she's just a very talented, highly trained agent. Clint knows better, was the one who brought her in, who sat with her between the sessions necessary to free her mind, who held her when her body betrayed her and shook with anxiety and pain. Clint knows her better than anyone, knows that she pulls her punches when she spars, knows that her bones knit together almost overnight, has seen her use the full extent of her abilities and seen the ruin she leaves in her wake. Clint knows what a monster she is. The others think she's human.

She wishes she could tell them the truth.

If Natasha thought she was still capable of love, she would love her team. They're all bull-headed and endlessly frustrating, but they're hers. She's theirs. It's nice to belong to something, to belong to other people, without being solely dependent on them. They don't control her, would never try to, and that endears them to her even more.

She's still scared by Steve, sometimes. By who he is, what he means for her. Neither of them know how long they'll live. She doesn't know how to talk to him about it, if she even should. She thinks that he could benefit from knowing someone out there is in similar shoes, that he's not entirely alone in this future that stretches on further than the eye can see. But Natasha doesn't know how to put those feelings into words. She can perform monologues and soliloquies about her character while undercover, but she's never found a way to verbalize Natasha. So instead, she sits with him and reads while he sketches faces long gone and faces new, and sometimes they speak in quiet Russian about his childhood and the war.

(Many years in the future, Natasha will be sitting with Steve on the balcony and take his hand and tell him she will be here as long as he needs her. They are never lovers, never will be lovers, but they stick together because no one else can.)

Tony still irritates Natasha even at his best, but she understands him better than he realizes. He hasn't seen her unedited psych report, the one that sits in Fury's office under lock and key; he's only seen what they wanted him to see - "Tony Stark: Not recommended." Even though he doesn't know how to treat her, like Natalie Rushman or Agent Romanov, he still tries. In his own, awkward, over the top way, Tony tries to know her and trust her. He leaves extravagant gifts in her suite more often than not. He fills her wardrobe with clothes of her own when he finds out that most of what she's worn belongs to SHIELD. He upgrades her weaponry and designs her new toys and makes stupid remarks and stumbles through conversations.

(He builds her a dance studio and never says a word. She leaves him the complete report and trusts him to watch her back.)

She finds Thor an unexpected comfort, when he returns from Asgard. While he's usually loud and boisterous and energetic, he can also be quiet and wise. They spend mostly their time together in silence, or he tells her of his life back home - not the tales of glorious battle, those he saves for the entire group, but stories of his friends and the lady warriors and his family. In exchange, she talks about her solo missions, mostly with SHIELD but sometimes with the KGB. When she looks at him, sometimes his eyes are forever old and understanding. It makes her feel less alone.

(One night, while drinking Asgardian ale together, she tells him a little of the Room and Uncle Ivan. They fall asleep on the couch - when she wakes, she is curled into his side, his body positioned to protect her from harm. She wakes rested and warm.)

Bruce doesn't frighten Natasha, not in the way he thinks. He thinks she's terrified of the Hulk and she's not. She has a healthy amount of caution for the Hulk but she also knows that she could probably survive him if he turned on her (them). Bruce frightens Natasha because he ages. She's seen the pictures of him from before the Hulk and he's aged. She doesn't understand why his altered serum allows him to live like other people and it scares her. And she's a little jealous, too. The Hulk might not let him go before his time, but Bruce will most certainly die of old age on a day that isn't too distant.

(They bond over fragrant tea from India and yoga. She finds his calm quiets something caged in her mind.)

No, Natasha doesn't love them, but she thinks she feels something not too far from it. She can't remember love, can't remember being loved by anyone, but she sees the way her team looks at her and sees the way they treat her and thinks, maybe. She thinks they might love her and she hopes that one day, she might love them, too; it's a childish notion but she can't find it in herself to hate it.

The Black Widow can't remember much and is frightened by her own body and will never earn redemption.

But perhaps Natasha Romanov has found a home.

(In a red room, Natalia Alianova Romanova spins on her toes, her heart full of love.)


End file.
